Does Luck Help Us Succeed?
It Depends on How You Define Luck
Luck has an allure which even the most rational person cannot resist. We believe that people did not merely earn their success; they were lucky to some extent.
“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?”
(Jean Cocteau)
The consensus seems to view luck, not as mere chance but as the serendipitous congruence of the right preparation meeting the right opportunities.
In other words, successful people harnessed the power of luck by putting in the efforts and by placing themselves in situations that attracted wonderful fortune.
“The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.” (Tony Robbins)
Dame Luck or whatever name we used to call her is not capricious. To receive her patronage, one has to think, behave, and work in certain ways.
“I have found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.” (Brian Tracy)
Richard Wiseman, in his book “Luck Factor”, identifies four attitudes and behaviours that will help us harvest luck.
- Maximize Your Chance Possibilities
We must keep our eyes open, tapping into emerging opportunities. Social networks can help us interact with more people from different walks of life.
“Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” (Thomas Edison )
Sometimes, being with the right persons, at the right place, and at the right time can help us seize opportunities for growth. But you will not reach this happy junction by accident. How you undertake your life journey, and how you work, will bring you to this crossroads.
2. Listen to your lucky hunches
“The heart has its reason that reason does not know of.” (Blaise Pascal )
What we call intuition is pattern recognition. Your subconscious has recorded experiences that you can tap into to seize opportunities for success. It is Emotional Quotient (EQ) riding piggyback on Intelligence Quotient (IQ )
3. Expect Good Fortune
This is about having a lucky mindset. One must believe that it is possible to set up a rendezvous with Dame Luck. The chief priestess of fortune likes those who like her and want to meet her. A lucky mindset can create self-fulfilling prophecies.
4. Turn Bad Luck into Good
To be paralyzed into inaction by failure is a sign of weakness. Failure contains within itself the germs of success.
“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.” (Winston Churchill )
Edward de Bono, in his book, “Tactics: The Art and Science of Success” interviews 50 successful people to study the underlying patterns of their success.
He does not rule out the role of luck in the cases of some successful people. But those who had a positive attitude towards luck had better chances to succeed than those who had a passive attitude towards luck.
“The positive attitude is that you put yourself in a position to take the maximum advantage of any luck that comes your way. The positive attitude means that you are able to carry to success whatever turns up by luck. The positive attitude means that you are very ready to spot opportunities, and it also means that you may generate such opportunities deliberately. This attitude acknowledges luck as a possible ingredient in some cases of success and then places the operational emphasis on the other ingredients, such as determination, strategy, and style.”
Lucky people are not merely more fortunate than others, they possess certain attributes that make it easy for them to get lucky.
Thanks for reading.